The violin, viola, and cello produce a variety of musical pitches through the placement of fingers on the strings. Placing a finger on a string raises the pitch of the string by shortening its length as it vibrates. These instruments do not use frets to delineate necessary positions of the fingers, but like fretted instruments, the stop positions for higher pitches become progressively closer. Correct positioning of fingers is accomplished through muscle memory, in particular, knowing whether there is a space between two fingers or not as they are placed on the string. Understanding these relationships is essential to playing the instrument well, and basic learning of the correct positions is usually accomplished through intensive drills in each of the standard hand positions up the neck, while a knowledge of theory allows the player to deduce the correct fingering, albeit more slowly, from first principles.
There are 12 distinct notes in western music; each note is the root of a major and minor scale. These scales are experienced aurally because of specific relationships between the notes in each scale. Modes other than major and minor, and scale patterns from both western and nonwestern music, have their own specific note relationships.
In the field of musical pedagogy various hand-held devices, including musical slide rules, have been developed for assisting musicians and teachers to determine notes and chords for the piano, guitar, and general music theory.
U.S. Pat. No. 395,067 issued to Maggs in 1888 for a guide to pianists seeking the right notes to play in various musical keys, using a representation of a piano keyboard and sliding cards.
U.S. Pat. No. 675,345 issued to Bauer in 1901 for a slide rule device which indicated the names of notes that form various chords in the musical keys selected by the user.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,938,421 issued to Leonard in 1960 for a teaching aid for learning piano, involving a chart with sliding cards and a circular slide rule showing the names of notes in various chords
U.S. Pat. No. 3,668,967 issued to Malis in 1972 for a sliding mechanism used to find the names and positions of notes on the guitar within selected chords.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,728,931 issued to Leonard in 1973 for a device indicating musical notation and names of notes and chords as related to playing them on the piano, using a sliding mechanism.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,960,029 issued to Nelson in 1990 for a slide rule showing the names of notes in various musical scales.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,386,757 issued to Derrick in 1995 for a slide rule helping guitarists find the placement of notes in various chords along the fingerboard of the guitar.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,323,410 issued to Rackow in 2001 for a slide rule indicating the names of notes in various musical scales.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,969,793 issued to Kerkhoff in 2003 for a slide rule helping pianists find chords and notes on the piano.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,345,236 issued to Worrall in 2008 for a computing system to calculate fingering positions for an inputted composition.
As described more fully below, the present invention provides a hand-held musical reference guide for an instrument of the violin family, and presents a visual map of the finger positions and their relationships in each musical key, as played on the fretless instruments of the violin family. The invention includes printed components which together display the possible positions for each finger, and within those positions, said invention indicates the appropriate positions for each finger within each musical key, allowing the user to play a major or minor scale in every key. While the invention may be implemented with various cursor or sliding elements, preferably the invention is implemented by a first component, which is a pocket or sleeve having one or more windows, and a second component which is a sliding card having information or indicia visible through the window(s). Additional inner cards allow the user to properly place the fingers in positions higher up the neck, and for modes and scale patterns other than major or minor.
The slide rule nature of the invention is made possible by the fact that the key signatures in western music are traditionally organized as a cycle of fifths, meaning that the root note of each key is five notes away from root note of the neighboring key, a “neighboring key” being the musical key with one more or one fewer sharps or flats than the original key.
The strings of the violin family instruments are also organized in fifths, with each string five notes away from its neighboring string. Because of this, fingering patterns for one musical key are very similar to fingering patterns for the neighboring key, the difference between the two keys primarily requiring that the fingering pattern shift over by one string. This consistency gives rise to the opportunity to represent all of the common fingering patterns for all the musical keys on a single slide rule, with each fingering pattern shifting over one string each time the inner slide member is moved to reveal an adjacent key, which is offset by one fifth.
Musicians working with instruments of the violin family must learn the spacing and relationships of the finger positions in the many musical keys. For many players, a visual representation of these patterns is very helpful; it is especially useful to have all the needed patterns and keys available for reference in a single fingering guide, as accomplished by this invention.